Chapter 15
CAIN
The scent of sharp medicinal waters and heavy, aged granite usually cleared the lingering residue of consumed emotions. But tonight, the process was a grating failure.
I had just returned from the filtration chamber, a sterile, subterranean cell maintained deep within the bedrock of the Alistair Threshold.
The Threshold itself was a masterpiece of ancient, elegant masonry—a towering, vaulted archway carved from seamless black stone that seemed to drink the surrounding shadows.
Spanning the heavy stone arch was the barrier: a thick, liquid membrane that defied gravity, shivering like dark mercury suspended in the gloom.
It possessed the exact, terrifying texture of my own Void.
Other Cenites always described their passage through such gates as walking through cold, stagnant water—a lifeless, functional magic meant only to filter and protect.
But the Alistair Threshold and none of them for that matter, did not treat me with such indifference.
Whenever I approached, the dark viscosity felt like reaching out.
It hummed, the liquid surface rippling in eager recognition of the monster it was about to receive, parting over my skin with a shuddering, almost symbiotic intimacy.
This ritual was not one of choice, but of desperate, biological necessity: the mandatory draining of collective agony.
Without it, the accumulation of foreign trauma would eventually calcify my own soul, turning me into a statue of other people’s pain.
And Primordial Gods forbid I turn into another Friedrik.
Tonight, I was not draining on command. I was attempting to drain myself. It was never a true solution, but it had kept me from going utterly insane twice now. However, I was running out of patience, and luckily, I now had a more permanent solution in the form of my new wife.
I stood in the centre of the cold stone room, the only light coming from the lichen cultivated in the high, damp corners of the vaulted ceiling.
I shed the outer layer of my soaked silk shirt.
It hit the floor with a wet thud. I peeled the fabric from my skin, grimacing as the cool air hit the feverish heat radiating from my chest.
The Masque Ball had been a feast of poison.
I had absorbed it all, like a glutton for punishment.
The suffocating judgment of the Consuls, heavy and cloying like old perfume; the sharp, acidic rage of Cecilia Ashworth, which tasted of copper and betrayal; the pathetic, drowning despair of Caspian Valerius; and—worst of all, the variable that was currently rotting me from the inside out—the terrified, humiliating arousal of my own wife.
It wasn’t a stream; it has been a flood. The memory of the dance—her body pressed against mine, the way her Life-Magic had sparked against my Void—was a corrosive river of pure, desperate sensation.
I braced myself, placing my hands on the Grounding Stone in the centre of the room. The basalt was etched with ancient runes designed to siphon energy into the earth, a magical heat-sink for the damned. Never enough since my dear wife joined our dysfunctional family.
Open.
The pain was physical. It began as a cramp in my solar plexus, spiralling outward.
First came Caspian. I felt the agonising twist of his heartbreak in my own gut—a sensation like drowning, water filling my lungs, the desperate, clawing need for air that wasn't there.
I felt his pathetic entitlement, the belief that he was the hero of this story, and the crushing weight of his failure.
It made me want to retch. I hated him not just for his weakness, but for the purity of his loss.
He grieved her as if he had loved her. Truly loved her.
Then came the mother. The white-hot shame of Cecilia’s slap seared my consciousness, a phantom sting on my cheek that mirrored Ophelia’s pain.
I felt the vibration of the impact, the sheer, narcissistic rage of a female who viewed her daughter as currency devalued.
It burned through my veins like acid, making my hands clench against the stone until the knuckles turned white.
It was a sensory assault that reduced my world to claustrophobic agony. The trauma filled the Void within me, a sharp, expanding shard of everyone else's destruction.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to smash the stone slab beneath my hands, to break the source of the agony until my knuckles shattered and the stone ran red.
Push it out.
I grabbed the bottle of Cenite brandy, poured another glass, and pushed harder, forcing the foreign emotions into the stone. The granite groaned, a low, vibrating sound of geological protest, absorbing the toxicity. The runes flared a sickly violet, drinking the bile I poured into them.
But the hardest part was not the pain. It was the pleasure.
Deep in the recesses of the memory, beneath the shame and the fear, was Ophelia.
I felt the echo of her core reacting to mine on the dance floor—the way her magic had curled around my darkness, not in battle, but in a desperate, heated embrace.
I felt the phantom sensation of her thigh brushing against my hand, the heat of her skin through the slit in that damned blue dress.
I poured another glass. Drank it in one sip.
I tried to purge it, but it clung to me like oil.
The Pain-Eater must consume the entirety of the trauma until the source is clean.
I pushed harder, sweating and shaking, struggling to pull the final, heavy remnants of her guilt—Ophelia's guilt for wanting me—from my mind, but I failed.
I had never been able to complete the purge on the handful of times I was my own subject.
When it was done, I slumped against the damp wall, breathing hard.
The sweat on my skin cooled instantly in the frigid air.
I was almost “clean," but I was definitely not empty.
The echo remained. This time, I did not bother pouring myself another glass and took a swig straight from the crystal bottle.
The silence, my most prized possession, had been violated and now I was drunk on top of it.
I wrapped myself in a heavy black robe and made the long trek up the spiral stairs, leaving the dungeon behind, and trying to walk in a straight line. I retired to my private study—a minimalist cell carved into the heart of the estate—to regain control.
I sat at my desk, my back ramrod straight, staring at a blank spot on the wall.
I was struggling to contain the acidic jealousy that wasn't entirely my own. It was a raw, putrid energy, the ghost of Caspian’s possessiveness and reckless defiance.
My control over my own emotions was usually absolute, but the parasitic feelings of others were my weakness.
Now, the Valerius boy's pathetic love was a poison in my mind.
“Kill the weakness. It contaminates your core,” Rhana’s mental snarl was sharp and brutal, echoing my own cold logic.
She lay stretched across the polished floor, a massive shadow in the dim light.
Occasionally she twitched a massive paw, her claws clicking against the stone like the ticking of a doomsday clock.
She was agitated by the foreign emotional noise leaking from me, her tail thumping a restless rhythm against the floorboards.
I closed my eyes, but the darkness offered no relief. Luckily, the alcohol made it a little more bearable.
I remembered the raw, forbidden heat of Ophelia's body pressed against me in the carriage. I remembered the rain.
I replayed the moment I had tied the satin interior of my jacket around her mouth.
It had been an act of necessity—to silence her, to restore order.
But my body hadn't reacted with logic. My body had reacted with a savage thrill.
The sight of her—eyes wide, chest heaving, silenced by my hand, gagged in a way—had ignited a fire in my blood that no filtration ritual could extinguish.
I had wanted to do more than silence her.
I had wanted to consume her scream. I had wanted to take her right there, on the plush bench of the carriage, while the storm raged outside.
The shame of that desire was a cold stone in my throat.
"The noise isn't Valerius, Cain. It's the memory of the dance. It's contamination of a different kind," Rhana’s internal voice added, sensing the true source of my current turmoil. Her gold eyes opened, fixing me with an unblinking stare. "You want her. You want to hunt her."
"I do not hunt my own wife," I said aloud, the words sounding hollow in the empty room.
"You are a predator," Rhana countered, her mental voice dripping with ancient instinct. "She is prey that fights back. That is the only kind you have ever liked."
I suppressed a violent urge to go to her chambers and smash the door down. To prove my familiar wrong. To prove that I was the master of this house, not a slave to biology.
I had been listening, of course. Earlier, when the surge of Aenite energy had spiked in her room, I knew she had used a Scry Stone. I hadn't caught the words, only the intent—desperation, connection, plotting.
She had called someone. Was it Caspian? Was she weeping to him about her imprisonment? Or was she forming some sort of a Resistance?
He is a fool. His light is brittle, I thought, crushing the lingering sensation of Valerius's jealousy until it was a fine, meaningless powder. But the act of crushing it left me exhausted and furious. Ophelia’s presence was already costing me resources I couldn't afford to lose.
She was turning my own fortress into a battlefield.
I picked up a slim silver scroll detailing the immediate protocols for a bonded pair. I unrolled it, the parchment crackling in the silence.
Protocol 1: Cohabitation required starting the first moon.
Protocol 2: Shared ritual bath on the new moon.
Fuck.